Ciao! Well, since I last updated the blog, we celebrated my friend Kelly's 21st birthday (as you can see by the last picture) We went to Park Guell on Friday and Montjuic yesterday. Then, today, we went to mass at the Barcelona Cathedral. I have to say, for three days, that is pretty decent.
Park Guell was not what I expected...in a good way. Unlike a normal park, or the Parque del Retiro in Madrid, Park Guell is a vertical park. I found that very interesting. To get there I had to take the bus, and that was an interesting experience. It astounds me what the bus drivers do here. I truly think they are defying physics or something the way they maneuver a huge bus down tiny streets. But it was fun! So, when I got there I saw this bridge that looks like something out of The Little Mermaid (see the first photo). Then, I walked past a pink house out to the famous plaza with the snake bench that winds itself (like a snake) around the plaza. The view of Barcelona was fantastic. Then, once you look down, you feel as if you are in a garden of gingerbread houses. This plaza is supported by rows of columns underneath. Out in front of them are three fountains and two rather large brown houses with sparkling, frost colored roofs and gumdrop details on the edges of the roofs. And, although it probably sounds like something out of a Dr Suess book, it fit. I could sense as I was walking there that that space was meant for just such a park.
On Saturday, my friends and I went to Montjuic, one of the mountains that surrounds Barcelona. I want you to feel what it was like so I am going to try to be a good writer and paint the picture for you rather than tell you straight out. So here it goes:
You step off the metro and onto the platform. As you walk towards the exit you here what sounds like an airplane taking off and realize that it is the metro speeding off into the black tunnel towards its next destination. Following the sign that says "Sortida" you walk up the stairs into a rather dull looking circle...with the exception of the large statue in the middle. You look around for the friends you are suppossed to be meeting there only to realize that there are five metros. Luckily, you , as a directionally challenged person, pull out your cell phone and call your friends to find out which station they are at. It takes a few tries because the word "theater" means something different to you, rather than the person you are talking too, but eventually you all find each other. You start walking towards two giant brick towers and peer out from behind them to discover you are walking towards a giant palace. Perhap one of the largest you have ever seen in your life. It has an H-shape, crowned with a giant cupola in the very center of the building. You can feel it start to pull you towards its splendor. Once you reach the main plaza, you climb fifty or so stairs to get to the courtyard. After admiring the building and taking an unspecified amount of photos, you turn to your right and begin the circuit you have planned to walk for a few hours. What your wonderful map neglects to tell you in its 2D form is the number of stairs it will take to reach your many destinations on the mountain. Regardless, you embrace it because you are in a foreign country and that is what you do. So, you climb the seventy stairs crowned on each side with sculpted fountains to a back street and over to another small circle. It too has a fountain, and after viewing the other side of the city normally hid by the mountain, you head up the hill towards the Olympic Stadium. You realize how peaceful it is here. There are no honking horns of cars or sounds of tires against the pavement, only the sound of your footsteps plodding along up the sidewalk and the occasional sound of a friend's laughter.
Now, if I am any kind of writer at all I hope I have wet your appetite for the rest of my story. I can give you another one for the mass we went to today in the church from the pictures up above. But, I am going to let the power of that church speak for itself. All I will tell you is that I like it better at night. It feels as if it was built for that, for its true beauty is in the way it uses the light. It is brilliant because it is dark. When walking inside of it, you can see the deep rich hues of truffle and sepia. It had every vibrant tone of brown one could possibly think of, and the contrast with the sparse, tranquil greys of the stone in Sagrada Familia made this even more startling.
I feel truly blessed to be here. I wish all of you could be with me, but I hope little things like this give you a taste of what I am living in. It is starting to feel that way now- like I live here rather than vacation here. Today was a prime example. After church, we came out to music and rings of dancing people in the square. They were dancing the sardana. Most of the shops are closed on Sundays, and it is a day dedicated to spending time with friends and family. So, in the Barcelona spirit, I am going to say adieu because I am meeting friends at a cafe to drink coffee and discuss all of the places we want to go while we are here. Ciao!
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